Anything Striking

While listening to a playlist Apple Music created for me (yes, I use Apple Music and not Spotify; let’s move on), I came across a song I liked and went to add it to my library. This habit is not out of the ordinary. Streaming has made new worlds of music so accessible, just waiting for your fingertips to tap ‘Add to Library.’ However, I paused immediately upon seeing the album art — a picture of an open mouth with black, rotting teeth. Although I anticipated that the album must be good based on that one song I heard, the connection I made with it was lost when the album art filled me with disgust.

Naturally, this made me curious.

One would assume that listening to music is simply about the music. After all, isn’t that what it is supposed to be about?

Often, the music we play while going about our lives only resonates with us in terms of its sound. But the original function of the album art — invented by a graphic designer who worked at Columbia Records — was to attract and entice customers to purchase vinyl at record stores. It was how we first interacted with the artist’s work, setting a mood like in Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon or contributing to a myth like with a barefoot Paul McCartney in The Beatles’ Abbey Road. In other words, it was integral to the artist’s branding, the sound their music explored, and the legacy it created.

But gone are the days when the album artwork was the first point of contact a body of work made with the listener’s fingertips, flicking through a stack of records, waiting for something to pop out, to come back home with you.

However, the physicality of owning music in the form of vinyl, cassettes, and CDs has waned off with the introduction, increased popularity, and convenience of streaming platforms.

This raises the question — in the age of streaming, what importance do album artworks hold?

Streaming has taken how we consume music and flipped it on its ears. It is no longer about the album as a whole but about individual tracks. And if a particular track is good enough to capture your attention, you might explore the album as a cohesive body of work. But, even with the streaming process being so… unified and uninteresting in terms of its visual stimulation, the album art remains the differentiating factor. It is the thing that makes a track stand out in a playlist of plenty of other songs, which makes you explore other tracks by the artist, turning you from a casual listener to a fan.

Just because the means of listening to music has evolved doesn’t change the primary function of album art. We do eat with our eyes first, still. In fact, in a very visually saturated world, the cover art has to compete with and stand out against a never-ending flood of visual content, and it needs to do that within seconds.

Just as the tracks tell a story, so does the album artwork. A visual connection adds to the sonic experience that the artist creates and is indisputable. Exquisitely beautiful, daringly controversial, or undeniably iconic album — artworks hold the power to start conversations, communicate stories, make headlines, and create mythical conspiracies. After all, there is a reason why there’s a queue every time you walk to Abbey Road or why the diagram for light dispersion will immediately remind one of Pink Floyd. Cover art is a visual manifestation of the artists’ identities, creating a portal for the listener to enter and explore the creative process behind the music, opening up not just your auditory senses but also the visual — all ultimately cementing a bond between the artist and the listeners.